To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.   - Winston Churchill

In the late 60s and 70s the top brass of an organization had simple goals to guide their activities: constancy and stability. The global markets were not so evolved and were relatively shut from each other. They did not have any proportionate impact on one another. For example - A particular movement in US stock markets did not have significant impact on Indian markets. Prices stayed in check; people had stable jobs; life was predictable. Today we are facing an entirely different scenario - Market transparency, labor mobility, global capital flows, and instantaneous communications. All these factors have directly affected Stability. In most industries - and in almost all organizations, heightened global competition has concentrated management's collective mind on something that, in the past, it happily avoided: Change . Successful companies, as Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter in 1999 said in Strategy + Business, develop "a culture that just keeps moving all the time." This presents most top executives with an unfamiliar challenge. In major transformations of large enterprises, they conventionally focus their attention on devising the best strategic and tactical plans. In order to succeed, they also must have an intimate understanding of the human side of change management - the alignment of the company's culture, values, people, and behaviors - to encourage the desired results. Plans themselves do not capture value; value is realized only through the sustained, collective actions of the thousands of employees who are responsible for designing, executing, and living with the changed environment. Long-term structural transformation has four characteristics: scale (the change affects all or most of the organization), magnitude (it involves significant alterations of the status quo), duration (it lasts for months, if not years), and strategic importance.

Today, many people feel that they are dealing with about as much change as they can take, yet the pace of change in society is not slackening. On the contrary, the pace is increasing. The management methods that have served us well in the past can work quite well in a stable situation. But these methods just don't deliver when the organization is trying to implement lots of changes. When change is rapid and frequent, it becomes impossible for a small group of managers to think and plan for everyone else. And in times of change everyone is under a lot of stress - emotions run high, many people feel stressed out. The people issues become much more difficult and important to deal with than in times of stability. The high performing organizations, because they are constantly adapting and striving for improvement (ISO 9001: 2000 compliance requires improvement initiatives to be highlighted; especially at the time of audits), have developed effective ways of engineering change. The methods that they have developed help ensure that changes are well planned and that people are engaged in the process. Having access to information and being able to participate actively helps people to cope with the various dimensions of change. Rather than becoming active opponents (resistors of change) they can find out why the changes are necessary, take part in planning the process, and take ownership of their part. They may even become enthusiastic about it. When change is properly planned and executed, people have the opportunity to become part of the solution, not part of the problem. This is an aspect which is frequently overlooked and becomes the cause of failed change initiatives. All organizations are imperfect, flawed creations - but some perform much better than others. In today's environment, those that cannot learn to change, adapt and improve as a way of life tend to go the way of the Dodo bird. However, improvement is not easy and in order to succeed, organizations have to face up to harsh reality - especially their own shortcomings, since these are where the golden opportunities for improvement are found.

The important question in any change program is where to start change? Should we go for radical change by affecting the core of the organization or we should start from the periphery in order to reduce the resistance and increase the likelihood of success of the program. McGrath and Krackhardt theorize that sometimes change should start from the periphery and sometimes from the core of the network. Network ties can also become definite source of change resistance. Hence, it is essential for the change agents to study the network conditions prevailing in an organization before proceeding to initiate change or transformation programs.

The concept of initiating change from the periphery or from the core is again a cause of concern and discussion. We always aim for a method which will reduce the changes of failure. The Hannan-Freeman (1984) theory of structural inertia has motivated a considerable body of empirical research on the effects of change in core organizational features on the hazard of mortality. Hannan and Carroll (Structural Inertia and Organizational Change - Revisited I: Architecture, Culture and Cascading) have proposed a central theorem holds that the magnitude of the effect of a change in architecture on an organization's hazard of mortality increases with the architectural and cultural significance of the change. Hannan and Freeman's (1984) original theory of structural inertia pertains to changes in "core" features, not peripheral ones. According to the theory, four features constitute a generalized core :

(1) Goals; ( Mission )

(2) Form of authority and the nature of the exchange between the organization and its members; (Leadership)

(3) The basic technology used to transform inputs into outputs; (Technology)

(4) The organization's general marketing strategy (Marketing Strategy)

Click here to read about Change Models >> or about Managing Change (Some Ideas) >>